To shape or Force
by Energywelder
Summary: PBC Round 4 story. My author note serves as a better summary.


To Shape or Force

"What's a good word for it?" Asami thought. "All I get to do all day is read and sign reports; earnings, production, financing, marketing, ugh, why won't it end?" Picking up another stack of vanilla folders from the "in" box, reading through its contents, signing the bottom, and then depositing said folder in the "out" box. "I know, slogging, I'm slogging through this."

"Why didn't we ever go to electronic filing?" Picking up the next envelope, another production report; from factory 17, in the past week 94 construction exo-suits produced, down from 102 the previous week. "Great, production is down too, why so much though? That's nearly ten percent." Notes at the bottom, '-production decrease due to recent health concerns.' "Health concerns? Vague enough for a break! Factory 17 is . . . in Funbar province? No, wait, it's across town: even better! Good excuse for a personal inspection, and of course health matters too." Tidying up, turning off the lamp. "Can't forget my coat, it's cold out today, and I have to remind Opal, I mean Lucy, she's not fooling anyone, to postpone anything important. Anything else, anything else?" Another glance at the now dim office. "Nope." Stepping out into the brightly lit hallway.

'Lucy, can you push all of my appointments back if I'm not back in the next two hours? I'm heading over to factory seventeen for an inspection.' "Lucy" looked up from her desk's computer and smiled brightly at the CEO.

'Of course Ms. Sato. There'll be a car waiting out front for you, and I'll make sure to call ahead so the manager knows you're coming. While you're gone, I'll make sure your finished reports get to records.' Asami smiled at her assistant. Even if she was a corporate spy, she took her assistant duties very seriously.

'Thank you Lucy, I'll see you this afternoon when I get back.' As Asami stepped past her assistant's desk, she heard the phone being picked up, and a few quiet words mumbled into it, before it was quickly set down, and Lucy got up and went into the businesswoman's office.

* * *

The factory was noisy, to say the least. Although nothing was moving particularly fast, whatever was moving was making a tremendous amount of noise. "Thank goodness for these huge earmuffs." Indeed, over the CEO's ears was a massive set of industrial earmuffler's, atop which sat a bright blue hard hat, "Safety first!", complemented by a bulky set of plastic goggles over her eyes. Almost all the workers were wearing at least the same amount safety gear, if not more.

Moving up and down one of the assembly lines, Asami got to see one of her company's construction exo-suits, CES for short, in production from start to finish. They weren't particularly big or cumbersome, but they allowed construction workers to lift more than four times their weight over their heads as high as ten feet above them. To say the least, it was a very popular product, making construction over all go much faster, and cutting into demand for small capacity cranes, built by rival manufacturers, as an added plus. Finally, she decided to follow the floor manager who had been gesturing for a couple minutes now to a sound proofed office.

Asami cut right to the chase. 'Now, Mr. Frannen, I'm sorry for disturbing your work schedule today, but I received a report today that your factory's production had slowed approximately ten percent, and normally I would understand normal ups and downs, but nearly ten percent is quite a bit more than a normal up and down. And your note of "health concerns" was especially disturbing.'

Frannen, the floor manager, removed his helmet and let his goggles fall to his chest. As he sank back into his office chair he let out a sigh that in the relative quiet of the office sounded thunderous. As he took a moment to consider his clasped hands before him, he began, 'Well it's like you said, ma'am, that production will go through cycles. But, yes, a couple weeks ago we had some health issues here. One of the workers, Pieter, came to the factory sick with the flu. Now normally we try as a team to keep the workplace healthy, but for the first few hours on the line, he passed it off as just not dealing with the noise so well. We get that here sometimes, the sounds and work just stress the body into thinking it's sick, and well he didn't want to miss a day's pay, so for approximately four hours he was working, while sick, before a supervisor noticed how ill he looked and sent him home."

The man took another second to collect his thoughts "In those four hours, Pieter managed to infect, somehow, at least twenty other workers. Of those, several went on to infect others. Consider that, despite heavy automation here, many parts have to be hand assembled because their components are so delicate, so any manpower shortage will hurt production." He took a moment to make a grand waving gesture at the line outside. "Out there right now, I have approximately ninety percent of the number of people I'd prefer to have, of which some twenty percent are very recent hires, not yet fully trained for the jobs they're doing."

As the two managers continued discussing the recent outbreak, neither noticed the various robotic arms across the factory begin spinning around at max speed, flinging pieces of exo-suit everywhere. In fact, they were so engrossed in their conversation that they only took notice of the commotion outside the office when the commotion came _into_ the office. At high speed. Through the window. Crushing the desk between the two, with the force of the wind knocking Asami's hard hat off.

* * *

Posted on 8/21/015

I wanted to write more to this chapter, but I wanted to see what people thought about it first. I started out trying to write in only 1st person, as the additional prompt dictated, but that wasn't going so well, so sorry for those first paragraphs. As a whole I'm not satisfied with where this was going, which is a shame because I had a good idea. Bending is completely unknown to the general public. The Avatar exists but she will be introduced next chapter I guess. If anyone thinks they can write this better, please contact me so I can follow YOUR story.

Word count: 953


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